Payments conference update

Shameless plug time...The website has been launched for the FStech/Retail Systems Payments Conference, which will take place on Thursday, 10 November at The IoD Hub, London.

Speakers/panellists will include: Carl-Olav Scheible, UK MD, PayPal; Jeremy King, European Director, PCI-SSC; and Philip Hellyer, Enterprise Architecture Group, BestBuy Europe and Carphone Warehouse Group. The conference will be chaired by Vendorcom’s Paul Rodgers and will examine the latest cards and payments developments which are demanding a huge amount of attention in the retailer and financial sector communities. Paul will also take a look at the future of cards and payments. I know he has some really interesting views on that so miss it at your peril! There will also be discussion panels covering NFC/mobile payments and cash vs cards.

Further info here.

Common sense prevails as cheques given reprieve

Fantastic to hear that the Payments Council has scrapped plans to phase out cheques by 2018. The plans had met with a backlash from the likes of charities and politicians, leading the Treasury Select Committee to reopen its probe.

Richard North, chairman of the Payments Council, has said: "It's in the DNA of the Payments Council to consult and listen to all those people who actually make payments and use cheques."

Hmmm, well better late than never, I guess. Of course, there has been a marked decline in cheque usage as chip and PIN has soared, but many people still rely on them and the 2018 deadline always smacked of the banks (aggrieved at how much it costs to process cheques) forcing something through with little or no regard for their customers, most notably those in the charity sector and small businesses. To quote Simon Morrison, director of marketing and communications at the Institute of Fundraising: "We are delighted that the Payment Council has disposed with the proposed end date for cheques. This will make a world of difference to a lot of our members, especially as some charities currently receive up to 80 per cent of their funding by cheques. For a large cohort of donors cheques are a preferred method of donation."

You’ve been Twitterhacked

PayPal UK's Twitter account was yesterday taken over by a disgruntled customer who fired off a series of angry tweets complaining about the service. The unidentified person railed against PayPal freezing their account and also linked to paypalsucks.com, the "anti paypal site exposing the nightmare of doing business 'the paypal way.'

Last night, the Ebay-owned outfit suspended the account and stressed that this incident only affected Twitter and none of its credit card or other sensitive data had been breached. The account was quickly back up and running and the company tweeted: 'This account was hacked earlier. We have it in our control now. Your personal data is still 100% safe, hack occurred on Twitter not PayPal' and 'We apologise for the bad language and childish nature of tweets that came from this account at the time.'

I’m a big fan of Twitter. It is proving to be a really useful way for FStech to communicate with readers, distribute news and catch stories that might otherwise have passed us by. However, the relative ease with which one can access someone else’s account is a concern. The simple password system needs to be looked at and perhaps replaced by a two-way authentication system, at least on certain accounts.